The Book of M

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man's shadow disappears--an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max's shadow disappears too. Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless. As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

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I was also skeptical about this book when I started it, and put it down for a week, not sure that I would bother to finish it. But I did, and I am so glad. An intriguing plot (encompassing a dystopian future, magic, religious cults, and a love story) that examines of who we are if we lose our memories, and what happens to the people who are forgotten.

For the first quarter of this book I was skeptical. A shadow is not a thing. It can’t be lost. What sort of nonsense is this? I’m so glad I stuck with it. What an emotional ride! It’s hard to describe without giving too much away, so I’ll just say it’s very different from other “dystopian future” books that I’ve read. It even has aspects of magical realism, which is my favorite genre. Mainly it’s a love story, actually two love stories. It’s also a book about how we learn to communicate with each other and how we remember each other…or not. Wow, it’s apparently hard to classify a specific genre but I will admit I was crying by the end. I think this will probably turn out to be one of my favorite books of the year.

Shepherd takes an ambitious, original idea and grows it to a fantastic novel through character development and a deeply thought out system of magic. People lose their shadows, then their memories. What they forget can disappear, and what they remember incorrectly can change what's real for everyone. In the post-apocalyptic world formed accidentally by the shadowless, people struggle to survive and find loved ones. Reads like Station Eleven meets Amatka.